Don’t laugh derisively, as people do these days, but I’ve always admired the New York Times. First draft of history. Talent everywhere. Best production values. Even with its ideological spin, it can be scrupulous about facts. You can usually extract the truth with a decoder ring. Its outsized influence over the rest of the press makes it essential. I’ve relied on it for years. Even given everything, and I mean everything.

Until now. It’s just too much. Too much unreality, manipulation, propaganda, and flat out untruths that are immediately recognizable to anyone. I can’t believe they think they can get away with this with credibility intact. I’m not speaking of the many great reporters, technicians, editors, production specialists, and the tens of thousands who make it all possible. I’m speaking of a very small coterie of people who stand guard over the paper’s editorial mission of the moment and enforce it on the whole company, with no dissent allowed.

Let’s get right to the offending passage. It’s not from the news or opinion section but the official editorial section and hence the official voice of the paper. The paragraph from June 2, 2020, reads as follows.

Healing the wounds ripped open in recent days and months will not be easy. The pandemic has made Americans fearful of their neighbors, cut them off from their communities of faith, shut their outlets for exercise and recreation and culture and learning. Worst of all, it has separated Americans from their own livelihoods.

Can you imagine? The pandemic is the cause!

I would otherwise feel silly to have to point this out but for the utter absurdity of the claim. The pandemic didn’t do this. It caused a temporary and mostly media-fueled panic that distracted officials from doing what they should have done, which is protect the vulnerable and otherwise let society function and medical workers deal with disease.

Instead, the CDC and governors around the country, at the urging of bad computer-science models uninformed by any experience in viruses, shut down schools, churches, events, restaurants, gyms, theaters, sports, and further instructed people to stay in their homes, enforced sometimes even by SWAT teams. Jewish funerals were broken up by the police.

But to hear the New York Times tell the story, it was not the lockdown but the pandemic that did this. That’s a level of ideological subterfuge that is almost impossible for a sane person to conjure up, simply because it is so obviously unbelievable.

It’s lockdown denialism.

Why? From February 2020 and following, the New York Times had a story and they are continuing to stick to it. The story is that we are all going to die from this pandemic unless government shuts down society. It was a drum this paper beat every day.

Consider what the top virus reporter Donald J. McNeil (B.A. Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley) wrote on February 28, 2020, weeks before there was any talk of shutdowns in the U.S.:

There are two ways to fight epidemics: the medieval and the modern.

The modern way is to surrender to the power of the pathogens: Acknowledge that they are unstoppable and to try to soften the blow with 20th-century inventions, including new vaccines, antibiotics, hospital ventilators and thermal cameras searching for people with fevers.

The medieval way, inherited from the era of the Black Death, is brutal: Close the borders, quarantine the ships, pen terrified citizens up inside their poisoned cities.

For the first time in more than a century, the world has chosen to confront a new and terrifying virus with the iron fist instead of the latex glove.

And yes, he recommends the medieval way. The article continues on to praise China’s response and Cuba’s to AIDS and says that this approach is natural to Trump and should be done in the United States. (AIER called him out on this alarming column on March 4, 2020.)

McNeil then went on to greater fame with a series of shocking podcasts for the NYT that put a voice and even more panic to the failed modeling of Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College London.

This first appeared the day before his op-ed calling for global lockdown. The transcript includes this:

I spend a lot of time thinking about whether I’m being too alarmist or whether I’m being not alarmist enough. And this is alarmist, but I think right now, it’s justified. This one reminds me of what I have read about the 1918 Spanish influenza.

Reminder: 675,000 Americans died in that pandemic. There were only 103 million people living in the U.S. at the time.

He continues:

I’m trying to bring a sense that if things don’t change, a lot of us might die. If you have 300 relatively close friends and acquaintances, six of them would die in a 2.5 percent mortality situation.

That’s an astonishing claim that seems to forecast 8.25 million Americans will die. So far as I know, that is the most extreme claim made by anyone, four times as high as the Imperial College model.

What should we do to prevent this?

You can’t leave. You can’t see your families. All the flights are canceled. All the trains are canceled. All the highways are closed. You’re going to stay in there. And you’re locked in with a deadly disease. We can do it.

So because this coronavirus “reminds” him of one he read about, he can say on the air that four million people could soon die, and therefore life itself should be cancelled. Because a reporter is “reminded” of something.

This is the same newspaper that in 1957 urged people to stay calm during the Asian flu and trust medical providers – running all of one editorial on the topic. What a change! This was an amazing podcast — amazingly irresponsible.

McNeil was not finished yet. He was at it again on March 12, 2020, demanding that we not just close big events and schools but shut down everything and everyone “for months.” He went back on the podcast twice more, then started riding the media circuit, including NPR. It was also the same. China did it right. We need to lock down or people you know, if you are one of the lucky survivors, will die.

To say that the New York Times was invested in the scenario of “lock down or we die” is an understatement. It was as invested in this narrative as it was in the Russia-collaboration story or the Ukrainian-phone call impeachment, tales to which they dedicated hundreds of stories and many dozens of reporters. The virus was the third pitch to achieve their objective.

Once in, there was no turning back, even after it became obvious that for the vast numbers of people this was hardly a disease at all, and that most of the deaths came from one city and mostly from nursing homes that were forced by law to take in COVID-19 patients.

That the newspaper, a once venerable institution, has something to answer for is apparent. But instead of accepting moral culpability for having created a panic to fuel the overthrow of the American way of life, they turn on a dime to celebrate people who are not socially distancing in the streets to protest police brutality.

To me, the protests on the streets were a welcome relief from the vicious lockdowns. To the New York Times, it seems like the lockdowns never happened. Down the Orwellian memory hole.

In this paper’s consistent editorializing, nothing is the fault of the lockdowns. Everything instead is the fault of Trump, who “tends to see only political opportunity in public fear and anger, as in his customary manner of contributing heat rather than light to the confrontations between protesters and authority.”

True about Trump but let us remember that the McNeil’s first pro-lockdown article praised Trump as perfectly suited to bring about the lockdown, and the paper urged him to do just that, while only three months later washing their hands of the whole thing, as if had nothing to do with current sufferings much less the rage on the streets.

And the rapid turnaround of this paper on street protests was stunning to behold. A month ago, people protesting lockdowns were written about as vicious disease spreaders who were denying good science. In the blink of an eye, the protesters against police brutality (the same police who enforced the lockdown) were transmogrified into bold embracers of First Amendment rights who posed no threat to public health.

Not even the scary warnings about the coming “second wave” were enough to stop the paper from throwing out all its concern over “targeted layered containment” and “social distancing” in order to celebrate protests in the streets that they like.

And they ask themselves why people are incredulous toward mainstream media today.

The lockdowns wrecked the fundamentals of life in America. The New York Times today wants to pretend they either didn’t happen, happened only in a limited way, or were just minor public health measures that worked beautifully to mitigate disease. And instead of having an editorial meltdown over these absurdities, preposterous forecasts, and extreme panic mongering that contributed to vast carnage, we’ve seen an internal revolt over the publishing of a Tom Cotton editorial, a dispute over politics not facts.

The record is there: this paper went all in back in February to demand the most authoritarian possible response to a virus about which we already knew enough back then to observe that this was nothing like the Spanish flu of 1918. They pretended otherwise, probably for ideological reasons, most likely.

They warned that 8.25 million people would die in the United States unless we had a medieval-style authoritarian lockdown. Where is the admission of error? Why have they stopped even talking about the lockdown?

It was not the pandemic that blew up our lives, commercial networks, and health systems. It was the response to the virus that did that. The Times needs to learn that it cannot construct a fake version of reality just to avoid responsibility for what they’ve done. Are we really supposed to believe what they write now and in the future? This time, I hope, people will be smart and learn to consider the source.

“Coronavirus hasn’t been a thing since Friday,” said a friend. “The new story is racism.”

Following American media culture can make one’s head spin.

For three months, all we heard was the danger to life and civilization presented by a novel virus. Millions will die! Few will be spared! There will be unprecedented suffering unless we completely shatter the normal functioning of life. Lock down, shelter in place, and stand six feet apart – very strange exhortations never before heard in the modern history of annual viruses or any public policy in many lifetimes.

All of it enforced by the police power. The same police power that eventually landed on the neck of George Floyd.

They screamed that we had to close schools, shopping centers, sports, and only allow “essential” business to function even if tens of millions lose their jobs, because lives – lives that the police power has utterly disregarded during the protests – are just that important. Lockdown required that the law change on a dime, in violation of every legal precedent, every slogan in American civic mythology, and contradicting the whole of what made America great.

In three days in mid-March 2020, everything we previously believed had to end because we had to implement a new experiment in social control as cobbled together by “public health officials” some 14 years ago. They sat around for a decade and a half, bored and waiting to use the new way to combat viruses. Any old virus would do so long as it was a slow news day. COVID-19 was as good an excuse as any. Out was every foundational belief in liberty, property, and free association, in the blink of an eye.

That was 75 days ago. People were surprisingly compliant, but what could they do? They were scared, thanks to media frenzy, and they weren’t allowed out of their houses to protest in any case. When they did defy the orders to protest in front of capitol buildings, instead of staying home and watching CNN, they were derided by CNN as disease spreaders and enemies of public health.

I’m looking at the headlines today and all the news on the coronavirus is below the fold or in its own section. It’s all about the protests, riots, and looters. Racism. Trump is screaming for a crackdown while the media demands justice for police brutality. As for social distancing, this was absolutely yesterday’s news. Now a new ethos has taken hold: gather in the largest possible groups to demand social justice. And loot.

Absolute hymns to the glory of protestors and even rioters are the rule of the day, as if the public health threat of COVID-19 is so last week. “Each night, tens of thousands exercise their right to assemble in protest and millions of Americans follow along at home,” writes the New York Times rhapsodically and correctly, failing to point out that this same venue said the opposite about lockdown protestors a few weeks ago.

Weeks! Is it an indication of the extremely short attention span of the American public or a demonstration of the sheer cynicism of media culture?

Meanwhile, on the corona front – yes that still exists even if you have to dig for information on it – states are still (still!) gradually ending the lockdown with cockamamie rules: you can sit (or stand) in bars but you can’t stand (or sit). Customers can buy things but not try on clothing. People can buy perfume but not spray on samples. In daycare facilities, the kids can play together in groups of more than 10 and they must stay apart, even though there is near zero threat to the kids from the virus.

These states that are imposing these crazy rules are four days behind the times. You look at the protests and you see free people doing what they believe they should do in the face of injustice. Many wanted to do this months ago but they were prohibited by law. The law eventually had to acquiesce to people’s sense of their human rights.

Why states do not instantly and immediately end all restrictions they wrongly imposed indicates the sheer stupidity of public policy, and the myth that it can ever be scientific. Instead we get curfews, even in the city that never sleeps.

The same governments that were only recently controlling your movements to protect you from a virus are now blasting people with tear gas.

As for lockdown “science,” the Centers for Disease Control keeps lowering its infection fatality rate. It’s becoming normalized like any virus: bad but not the end of the world. Best treated by medical professionals, not politicians – as we long knew until very recently.

The lockdown carnage from missed cancer diagnostics and forgone elective surgeries are only now presenting themselves. Then there are the 100 thousand wrecked businesses, the 40 million unemployment, the blown budgets of every government, the scary monetary policies. SWAT teams were entering bars to arrest people — in the name of health. Churches were shuttered on Easter. No restaurants, no shopping, no sports, no theaters, no gyms, no outdoor activities. We were all treated like animals, and told to cage ourselves in our homes. And so on it went for 75 days.

It’s hard to imagine a better recipe for social unrest.

Then the protests began. They were about the death of George Floyd, an unemployed man but they were also what he represented: the overwhelming presence of state violence in all of our lives.

Then the looting started. That too should not be a surprise. Lockdowners and looters use the same method (violence) to destroy property and commerce. One class of criminals learns from another class of criminals. It’s copycat criminology.

Now, as if to take that next step on the Road to Serfdom, all major cities have curfews.

Based on the speed and duplicity of the news cycle, we can predict with confidence that within six months, you won’t find a single person in public life willing to defend the lockdown. And yet it was this event that laid the foundation for the rest of the tragic unfolding of events that is wrecking this country.

There should be justice. There should be compensation. Political heads should metaphorically roll, along with the “public health officials” who advised them. And then we need a completely new direction: one that rejects the unscientific use of state force to battle a disease, recognizes the wisdom of the Bill of Rights and freedom, and treats people with the dignity that is inherent to every human life.

If we understand this desperate need – if we see what went wrong these months and the right way forward – we can rebuild. If we do not, the destruction and rights violations will continue.

Last month, there was a bit of a chill in my right molar. My left molar was already capped after a root canal. So I wondered if the same was happening on the other side. I called some local dentists. None were in operation but for emergencies and mine didn’t qualify. They said they would be opening in a few weeks but only for established patients. I’m not among them.

No problem, I thought. I will visit my mother in another state and go to a dentist there. No luck: there was a mandatory two-week quarantine for out-of-state visitors. I couldn’t be there waiting for two weeks. Plus when one of these teeth starts to go bad, as I recall, you are in severe pain within a few days. I could ask my mother to lie for me, but that’s not nice.

Fortunately, it was a false alarm and my tooth is fine. Even so, it was scary. Imagine living in a world in which essential dentistry was forbidden by governments for three months. It’s like living in the 18th century, or the 12th.

Unbelievable.

It’s not just about dentistry. By executive orders around the country, all nonessential medical procedures were ended to preserve hospital capacity around the country. It was part of the pandemic plan, don’t you know. This was also the reason for “flattening the curve” and “social distancing.” Hospitals can’t scale, don’t you know. The planners know what’s best.

Then something strange happened. All over the country, hospitals emptied, waiting and waiting for floods of COVID-19 patients but few arrived. Only in parts of New York City did resources become temporarily thin. Elsewhere in the country, hospitals almost entirely stopped doing business. Then the financial crisis hit. So far, 266 hospitals have furloughed workers. Then you have the enormous problem of delayed treatments, postponed checkups, bypassed diagnostics – all the things we use the medical system for on a normal basis.

And as with all crises, the current pandemic looks set to hit the poorest countries the hardest. Scientists have warned that, in some places, disruption to the control of diseases such as HIV, tuberculosis and malaria could lead to losses on the same scale as those caused directly by the virus. Similarly, experts fear that deaths from illnesses such as cholera could far exceed those from Covid-19 itself.

The tragedies here are countless, and should have been expected. If you impose a governor’s plan over the experience of hospital management, and do under a coercive threat, in the name of public health, you are likely going to see the opposite emerge.

So I asked my Twitter feed for some examples. Many I can’t print due to privacy concerns but here are just a few:

Just before “lockdown” I had abdominal pain and days of constipation. (Wish my issue was more glamorous.) I saw the lockdown looming so I went to the emergency room (March 11, 2020). Diagnosed with diverticulitis. Given antibiotics, for the abdominal infection, and referred to a Gastroenterologist for a colonoscopy. I keep attempting to make the appointment for the colonoscopy and they are telling me to try to schedule again at the beginning of June. In the meantime I have been trying to get my body to keep things moving by taking laxatives at times. I went 100 hours without a bowel movement.

I think I am getting my body back into a good routine. I can still go to work and play disc golf most of the time. So it’s not debilitating 95% of the time. I’ve lost 15 pounds (flattening my curve). I imagine much more serious issues occurring for others.

___

I fractured my collarbone in a road bike crash in May 2018. Being in Canada, I had to wait several painful days before surgery was scheduled to fix a metal plate to the broken bone. I was told that it was possible to have the plate removed after approximately six months when the bone would have healed. The discomfort from the plate rubbing under the skin, and from the tension of 9 screws in the small bone, made it an easy decision to request surgery to remove the plate.

My surgeon added my name to the waiting list in January 2019. At the time he said the average wait was about five months. After six months, I phoned the hospital and was told that I was still on the list but that they were scheduling people who had been on it for over a year. I was finally contacted in March 2020 (!) with a date two weeks later for the surgery. The day before, they called to ask if I had been out of the country or in contact with anyone who had been during the previous two weeks. The answer was yes, so they cancelled the surgery and said they would call me back. I’m still waiting.

____

I have extreme sciatica pain and my pain doctor after months has determined that I need a nerve block in my sacrum. This is an injection that literally can be done in less than ten minutes, but I have had to wait over 8 weeks in excruciating pain while they wait to get me in after the backlog in elective surgeries. They refuse to give me opioids.

_____

Not my personal story, but comes from our lawn care folks, a husband and wife team. She had a wisdom tooth that was pushing up too much and starting to be bothersome, and she had an appointment scheduled to have it removed. Then along comes COVID, and all non-essential medical treatments, including teeth extractions, are cancelled by executive fiat. (We are in Michigan, so this is Gretchen Whitmer, our governor who issued this order). Anyway, the tooth keeps bothering her. In short order an abscess forms, which goes septic, which leaks into her bloodstream. Oral antibiotics do not seem to cut it, and she ends up in ICU in hospital for 17 days on IV antibiotics.

I just spoke to her husband this morning, and she is now home though still very weak. According to him the hospital thought she was about 10 hours away from dying before they found the antibiotic combination that seemed to work.

Also anecdotal, our neighbors have two doctors in the family. One of them, a pediatrician, told me last week that basically he was bored because he had nothing to do with all non-essential appointments cancelled. The other one, an ER resident, told us that the word in the University of Michigan hospital system was that they are on track to lose about a billion dollars in Q1 of 2020.

_____

I’ve had a knee meniscus surgery delayed because of the virus, as well as follow up treatment for my recently operated on knee.

This is only a small look. An informal poll of my friends shows that almost everyone has faced some kind of delay or neglect, as a medical system designed to deal with such problems came to be victimized by the shutdowns.

New research published today in the Journal of NeuroInterventional Surgery (JNIS) shows ischemic stroke patients are arriving to hospitals and treatment centers an average of 160 minutes later during the COVID-19 pandemic, as compared with a similar timeframe in 2019. These delays, say stroke surgeons from the Society of NeuroInterventional Surgery (SNIS), are impacting both survival and recovery.

“The hospital was an ominous, nerve-racking and scary place for patients even before Covid,” said Dr. Lisa VanWagner, a transplant hepatologist at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago. “Now you take a stressful situation like a pandemic and you tell people that they cannot have their normal support system while they’re in the hospital, and that really magnifies those fears.”

The issue of delayed medical care, like countless others, was never mentioned in the glorified plans that public health professionals cobbled together over the last 14 years. They also failed to account for other major consequences, such as the psychological toll of being treated like animals, or riots in the streets.

The history of central planning is replete with failure. The lesson pertains in every area of life, not excluding matters of public health. One might think we would learn from the past rather than continuing to conduct such experiments with people’s lives.

See if you can make sense of the following transcript of an interview with Donald Trump on the lockdown, as conducted by Sharyl Attkisson.

President Trump: So I was hearing millions of people, and it would have been millions of people if we didn’t shut down. Now, would I shut it down again? No, because we understand it now much better. We didn’t know anything about it, it was new, it was fresh.

Sharyl: You mean you would not have, in retrospect, shut down the –

President Trump: I would have done exactly. We’ve done the exact moves that I would have done. And I did it early. Tony Fauci, Dr. Birx, they all said what I did was incredible. In retrospect, Tony, as you know, never thought he was going to be as severe as it was. And we’re talking about months later, a long time after I did the ban. I did a ban and nobody thought I should do it. I mean, literally I don’t think anybody thought I should do it. I made that decision by myself and it turned out to be a great decision. Hundreds of thousands of lives are saved.

Which is it? I get that all politicians are impervious to admitting error much less expressing contrition. It’s not just Trump. I’ve heard some version of this story from experts at all levels who both pushed the lockdown but now say it was a mistake – but a mistake that somehow had to be made because: “What else can you do?”

One thing you could do: in the absence of information, one could default to preserving human dignity, freedom, and the rule of law, and then get to work gathering information. Instead this one went the other way: shut down the whole of society simply because of uncertainties.

Are freedom and foundational principles luxuries in which we indulge and permit only under the right conditions? Do our rights exist only by permission of the state such that they can be blotted out under any pretense?

Now, you might say that a new virus in absence of testing is a rare exception. The trouble is that this is incorrect. A century of history in the U.S. is replete with new viruses, and tests have not always been available much less universal. Plus, the real record here demonstrates that a coterie of high-end experts had been waiting 14 years to deploy their experiment in a new paradigm for dealing with disease. In every other pandemic, the politicians stayed out and government left the economy alone. We trusted individuals and medical experts to deal with the problem, and it worked. Only this time did we flip the other way, and it will likely be years before it is universally admitted to be a catastrophic error.

There is also a psychological element here, fueled by media pressure. Early on, a friend of mine compared the panicked lockdowners to new residents of coastal towns during hurricane season. The media always and everywhere declares every hurricane to be the mother of all storms. They scream and yell for everyone to run and hide, go somewhere, anywhere, but there. Then the storm changes direction, which provides another excuse for a news update, telling more people to freak out and run for their lives.

No one knows for sure what the storm will be like or where it will land. It usually takes a couple of years for new residents to realize this, discount what the media is yelling, be cautious but remember that risk assessment is difficult. Mostly, there is most likely no good reason to spend days boarding up your house and then heading for the hills (given that the hurricane could hit the hills too). In other words, it takes a bit of time to become rational about these things but eventually everyone in coastal towns does.

What about those who spend weeks boarding up the house, thousands of dollars on food and freezers, and then days driving around with family in tow running from something that never materializes into anything but a bit of wind and rain? Now, the right answer is that all of this was a mistake. Clearly. But that is not usually the answer you get.

Instead, the panicked person will usually say: I did what I had to do given the information I had, and so, yes, if I had it to do over again, I would do exactly the same thing. This is of course completely irrational since there was no severe weather, and this is a known fact. Still, the pull of the sunk-cost fallacy to provide ex post rationales for irrational behavior is a powerful thing.

This problem now afflicts thousands of politicians in America. Much of the preposterous rituals we are going through – these distancing restrictions, mask mandates, occupancy limits, and so on – are nothing but imposed protocols to give the impression that it is a very dangerous and virus-infected world out there, so the lockdown was correct even if the virus turned out to be almost nothing at all for 99% of the public.

It would be similar to a mayor who irrationally ordered evacuation for a half-inch of rain to later order returning residents to wear rubber boots and eye goggles for a month. It’s a way of spreading and sharing fear to deflect from the egregious errors of the mayor himself. It’s ex post justification for coercing people pointlessly but trying to avoid blame (“We didn’t know anything about the storm, so we did the right thing.”).

Thus will we continue this opening-up kabuki dance for a few more months simply so that the politicians and panicked among us can save face and avoid admitting error.

And yet, daily the evidence pours in of the calamity. The latest calculations of loss reveal wreckage far beyond that of deaths from COVID-19. Authors Scott W. Atlas (Hoover Institution), John R. Birge (University of Chicago), Ralph L Keeney (Duke University and University of Southern California) and Alexander Lipton (Hebrew University) write:

The past century has witnessed three pandemics with at least 100,000 U.S. fatalities: The “Spanish Flu,” 1918-1919, with between 20 million and 50 million fatalities worldwide, including 675,000 in the U.S.; the “Asian Flu,” 1957-1958, with about 1.1 million deaths worldwide, 116,000 of those in the U.S.; and the “Hong Kong Flu,” 1968-1972, with about 1 million people worldwide, including 100,000 in the U.S. So far, the current pandemic has produced almost 100,000 U.S. deaths, but the reaction of a near-complete economic shutdown is unprecedented.

The lost economic output in the U.S. alone is estimated to be 5 percent of GDP, or $1.1 trillion for every month of the economic shutdown. This lost income results in lost lives as the stresses of unemploymentand providing basic needs increase the incidence of suicide, alcohol or drug abuse, and stress-induced illnesses. These effects are particularly severe on the lower-income populace, as they are more likely to lose their jobs, and mortality rates are much higher for lower-income individuals.

Statistically, every $10 million to $24 million lost in U.S. incomes results in one additional death. One portion of this effect is through unemployment, which leads to an average increase in mortality of at least 60 percent. That translates into 7,200 lives lost per month among the 36 million newly unemployed Americans, over 40 percent of whom are not expected to regain their jobs. In addition, many small business owners are near financial collapse, creating lost wealth that results in mortality increases of 50 percent. With an average estimate of one additional lost life per $17 million income loss, that would translate to 65,000 lives lost in the U.S. for each month because of the economic shutdown.

In addition to lives lost because of lost income, lives also are lost due to delayed or foregone health care imposed by the shutdown and the fear it creates among patients. From personal communications with neurosurgery colleagues, about half of their patients have not appeared for treatment of disease which, left untreated, risks brain hemorrhage, paralysis or death.

Here are the examples of missed health care on which we base our calculations: Emergency stroke evaluations are down 40 percent. Of the 650,000 cancer patients receiving chemotherapy in the United States, an estimated half are missing their treatments. Of the 150,000 new cancer cases typically discovered each month in the U.S., most – as elsewhere in the world – are not being diagnosed, and two-thirds to three-fourths of routine cancer screenings are not happening because of shutdown policies and fear among the population. Nearly 85 percent fewer living-donor transplants are occurring now, compared to the same period last year. In addition, more than half of childhood vaccinations are not being performed, setting up the potential of a massive future health disaster.

The implications of treatment delays for situations other than COVID-19 result in 8,000 U.S. deaths per month of the shutdown, or about 120,000 years of remaining life. Missed strokes contribute an additional loss of 100,000 years of life for each month; late cancer diagnoses lose 250,000 years of remaining life for each month; missing living-donor transplants, another 5,000 years of life per month – and, if even 10 percent of vaccinations are not done, the result is an additional 24,000 years of life lost each month.

These unintended consequences of missed health care amount to more than 500,000 lost years of life per month, not including all the other known skipped care.

If we only consider unemployment-related fatalities from the economic shutdown, that would total at least an additional 7,200 lives per month. Assuming these deaths occur proportionally across the ages of current U.S. mortality data, and equally among men and women, this amounts to more than 200,000 lost years of life for each month of the economic shutdown.

In comparison, COVID-19 fatalities have fallen disproportionately on the elderly, particularly in nursing homes, and those with co-morbidities. Based on the expected remaining lifetimes of these COVID-19 patients, and given that 40 percent of deaths are in nursing homes, the disease has been responsible for 800,000 lost years of life so far. Considering only the losses of life from missed health care and unemployment due solely to the lockdown policy, we conservatively estimate that the national lockdown is responsible for at least 700,000 lost years of life every month, or about 1.5 million so far – already far surpassing the COVID-19 total.

In conclusion, was this a mistake? Yes. It’s time to admit it. There ought to be acts of contrition from the political class and the modelers who advised them, in which they loudly and earnestly declare that they are heartily sorry for their sins, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

The idea of a full lockdown of society in the event of a pandemic first emerged as an extremist proposal in 2006, issued by a computer scientist as part of George W. Bush’s preparations for biowarfare. It provoked a fierce response by the world’s leading epidemiologist Donald Henderson and his colleagues. That proposal, issued by Robert Glass under the influence of his daughter’s high school science fair project (yes, it thanks Neil Ferguson for comments), would sit for 14 years before being deployed in some form during the political panic of March 2020.

This document introduced the new lexicon: Targeted Layered Containment (TLC), Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs), Social Distancing, Flatten the Curve. By the middle of March 2020, all of these strange phrases were on the lips of every news broadcaster and politician.

It was new vocabulary for new times which rejected the non-government solutions used in every pandemic since World War II. Hereafter, government would be hands-on with precision policies that infringe on liberties and property, with the presumption that under emergency conditions, government can do essentially anything that it wants.

This document did not push a hard lockdown but it did call for closures of all schools and large events, in addition to:

Voluntary home quarantine of members of households with confirmed or probable influenza case(s) and consideration of combining this intervention with the prophylactic use of antiviral medications, providing sufficient quantities of effective medications exist and that a feasible means of distributing them is in place.

On its face, there is nothing inherently threatening about a voluntary home quarantine of the sick. All of this happens in any case, normally and naturally, in all seasons in which viruses and bacteria threaten health, which is to say always. It requires no governing directives. There is no reason for government to weigh in on the matter at all.

However, matters are different with other directives from this 2007 document, including:

* Dismissal of students from school (including public and private schools as well as colleges and universities) and school-based activities and closure of childcare programs, coupled with protecting children and teenagers through social distancing in the community to achieve reductions of out-of-school social contacts and community mixing.

* Use of social distancing measures to reduce contact between adults in the community and workplace, including, for example, cancellation of large public gatherings and alteration of workplace environments and schedules to decrease social density and preserve a healthy workplace to the greatest extent possible without disrupting essential services. Enable institution of workplace leave policies that align incentives and facilitate adherence with the nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) outlined above.

While these measures might seem moderate by comparison to what happened in March 2020, these directives arguably led to lockdown just by the logic of intervention and the general theory that viruses should be defeated by overriding private decision-making and forced human separation.

In a market-based free society, everything is connected and one closure leads to another. Dismiss the schools and the kids hang out in malls, beaches, and parks. You have to close them to maintain distancing. If they stay home, they need a parent home, which puts pressure on businesses to close. If you are closing “large public gatherings” you still have a problem with churches, picnics, conventions of any size, and even large dinner parties. Transportation has to shut down, including flights, trains, and subways. A consistent application of the logic here – that the way to mitigate disease is to stay away from people – requires a complete shutdown of society.

And to what end? Epidemiologists will tell you that viruses don’t just get bored and go away. Natural immunity requires the building of antibodies to the virus. Then there is the option of vaccines, which have historically been long in the discovery, distribution, and administration. The first smallpox vaccine appeared in 1796; the disease wasn’t declared eradicated until 1980. But to the authors of the 2007 CDC directive, vaccines are the end game, even without evidence that they are possible in the case of new viruses such as COVID-19.

The point of closures, said the CDC, is to “delay the exponential growth in incident cases and shift the epidemic curve to the right in order to ‘buy time’ for production and distribution of a well-matched pandemic strain vaccine.”

To be sure, back in 2006 and 2007, there were plenty of serious protests against this whole line of thinking. Some experts called it disruptive, dangerous, and potentially calamitous, and pushed instead the old wisdom we had learned after World War II: disease mitigation efforts should be handled by medical professionals, not politicians. When the 1957-58 Asian flu broke out (eventually killing 116,000 Americans), for example, the New York Times expressed the common wisdom: “Let us all keep a cool head about Asian influenza as the statistics on the spread and the virulence of the disease begin to accumulate.” That was the one editorial the paper ran on the topic. It was the opposite of a media frenzy.

Lockdowns, as well as all this language and apparatus that amount to a primal scream to run and hide from the virus, were once considered bad law and bad medicine, and thus completely out of the question. The general rule was to stay calm, get immunities, and move forward with life without disruption. And there is where matters stood all these years, just waiting to be deployed by a handful of guardians of the strategy to undertake a great experiment in massive public control.

Beginning in January of this year, as news of COVID-19 was pouring out of Wuhan, China, many of those who were involved in crafting this policy in 2007 began to sense an opportunity. As the New York Times explains:

As the coronavirus emerged and headed toward the United States, an extraordinary conversation was hatched among an elite group of infectious disease doctors and medical experts in the federal government and academic institutions around the nation.

Red Dawn — a nod to the 1984 film with Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen — was the nickname for the email chain they built. Different threads in the chain were named Red Dawn Breaking, Red Dawn Rising, Red Dawn Breaking Bad and, as the situation grew more dire, Red Dawn Raging. It was hosted by the chief medical officer at the Department of Homeland Security, Dr. Duane C. Caneva, starting in January with a small core of medical experts and friends that gradually grew to dozens.

One of the most active participants on this thread was Carter Mecher, a Chicago physician who has long worked for the Veterans Administration as an advisor. He was actively involved in crafting the 2007 CDC document on school shutdowns and forced human separation.

Mecher had been a convert to the ideas of Robert and Sarah Glass and their blueprint for full lockdown. With the Glass father and daughter out of the picture, it was left to Mecher to push hard for a new approach to handling viruses. He more than anyone in the email thread posted often and with rising passion.

On January 28, 2020, he sent the following note.

The following month, he was already talking up Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions, a broad phrase that can mean everything from voluntary self-quarantine all the way to full lockdown.

The same day, Mecher began to promote the pro-lockdown work of Robert Glass:

“Lastly, another person, Bob Glass at Los Alamos, also did work on this separately from the MIDAS group. He actually began this work as part of a science fair project for his daughter (using social contacts of his daughter and her classmates at school to model disease transmission). He knew someone at VA who forwarded his work to us (chain of transmission). Early on (even before the MIDAS group modeled TLC ), we had a Eureka moment when we graphed his data in Excel ( can share that single graph to anyone interested).

After this, the tone and tenor of the group grew ever more fiery to the point of absolute frenzy. They needed the disease threat as intense as possible in order to kick off their plans, and they were probably sincere in believing it was time. As with any long email chain, there eventually emerges one tone setting and driver of discussion. In this case, Mecher became the main voice for panic and immediate deployment of the shutting of schools and public events, leading to lockdowns all over the country. .

If you have any doubt that the main push for the lockdown was less about therapy than models, inspired by the fantasies of a computer scientist rather than a genuine expert in viruses, a social experiment conducted with disregard for freedom and the rule of law, a wild and foolhardy central plan hatched without regard to experience or serious medical science, this email chain as passionate demand to implement the 2007 CDC blueprint is the proof.

Now the architects of 2007 are working themselves to socially distance from the lockdowns that have wrought so much damage to the country. I’m not so sure if they can or deserve to be declared free of responsibility. How many terrible atrocities in wartime result from a policy that began with a promise of only surgical strikes and precision bombings with no other casualties? We see something similar taking place here. Culpability belongs to those who unleash violence in the name of peace, or health.

I wanted to celebrate the opening day of breweries in Connecticut. But it was hardly that. Open means freedom of association and commerce. We are nowhere near that point.

You had to have reservations for a particular time slot, because they are only allowed a fractional capacity. You can only stay an hour and a half. Beer can only be sold in plastic cups and servers can’t touch the thing after you have touched it. You must bus your own table. You have to sit outside.

The mask mandate remains as confusing as ever: you have to put them on when you walk up the ramp to the beer garden but then you can take them off, unless you are the server in which case you have to scream your menu items through a cotton fabric and it comes out like a big muffle anyway. Health theater.

All of this is mandated by the government, as part of the slow-go opening, as if the politicians passing these mandates have any clue about risk, the power to control and direct a virus with precision, or any knowledge of this virus or viruses in general.

It’s all a crazy kabuki dance that everyone is going through, businesses and customers alike, even though it should be completely obvious to one and all by now that for the demographic of your typical brewery patron, this is hardly a disease at all.

We know vastly more about COVID-19 than we did early on, and the more we know the more preposterous is the entire lockdown, which is probably why the media-fueled fear mongering is rising and not falling during the opening. (To be sure, even if COVID-19 had turned out to be the bubonic plague, I still reject the idea that there is any excuse to violate human rights.)

Back to my brewery trip. My sense of dread about this outing quickly turned to happiness. There was a food truck. They were serving burgers. On the way in, I ordered one for me and each of my friends. They were delivered to the porch where we were seated. It tasted like the greatest meal I had in my life. It was astonishing. The food truck people were so incredibly happy to be selling, serving, making money, making people satisfied. Their typical tips this day were 50%. Rightly so!

It was the same at the brewery. Yes, the owner and servers were wearing masks, as mandated by the government. Still, you could almost see the smiles through them. They were practically yelling with delight to be back working, back in business, back serving the public. They were all hopping around like rabbits, even though the place was forcibly doing a fraction of its normal business. It was like two-plus months of pent-up energy pouring out all at once.

It was immediately obvious to me that these people have a vocation. They have dreams. They are meant to do this. It is a deep passion that burns within. They were wickedly and cruelly stopped from doing what they set out to do and robbed of two months of profits and two months of happiness in serving others. More importantly, their dreams of a secure legal environment to do business were crushed.

Finally with the opening, it was back – in a very truncated form but back nonetheless. You could just feel the energy and joy on the porch. It was a reminder to me that great entrepreneurs at every level of society possess a passion akin to great intellectuals, priests, or scientists. They believe that they are doing what they were born to do.

This country was founded to allow them to make their dreams come true. How and why we came to the place in which they were shut down coast to coast is a scandal for the ages.

Still, what I sensed here was a desire to move on. Don’t look back. Don’t seek justice. Don’t kvetch about whatever the hell just happened in the spring of 2020. Let’s just get on with business. Now.

A worry has haunted me during this lockdown concerning capital formation in the future. Why would anyone invest in anything if government can just shut it down on any pretext? Viruses, even new ones, even deadly ones, will always be with us, so does this mean that lockdowns and the pillaging of enterprises will be with us too? In that case, we face a very grim future.

But being out and about curbs my pessimism. The opening is taking place not because of government or the howling media; it is happening despite their objections and due only to massive public pressure. Sure, the polls are ambiguous; they always are on controversial topics.

What matters is the underlying passion for freedom that has been shown by the commercial community and average people, including the protestors in every town in America. People have been betrayed by their leaders; the passion to make matters right is boiling up all over the country. You see it in every Twitter feed of every governor. You detect it in conversations. You see it on the beaches, which are blessedly full. America is so over this.

What of capital formation in the future? It will undoubtedly be harmed. However: the passion and energy of the business community will not be so easily discouraged. It can overcome the threats, the bureaucrats, the political cowardice that led to lockdown, and even the legal ambiguity of the executive orders that brought it about.

The same passion will now seek absolute assurances that nothing like this will ever happen in our lifetime. There will be curbs on the powers that made this possible. They will be written in stone. Mixing the metaphor, they will hang over the political class like the Sword of Damocles. Changes in law can only go so far; the public must demand that their governments stop this. And if the public demands absolute assurances, and kicks out of office anyone who fails to promise “never again,” there is no reason for American entrepreneurs to be worried. The worst-possible thing has happened, and yet most have survived. Those who haven’t will find other ways forward.

American business owners and those who work to service the public via commerce cannot and will not let their dreams be stolen by a pathetic political class and a savagely ignorant media apparatus that understands not the first thing either about viruses or commerce, and cares nothing for people’s rights. This country is about realizing material and spiritual dreams. That means freedom as a first principle – a principle that can never be thrown away no matter the excuse of the moment.

Whether it is the direct unemployment effect or the potential poverty produced from the economic shutdown that leads to greater suicides, an increase from the 48,344 suicides and 1,400,000 suicide attempts in the US in 2018 should give decision-makers pause during their response to this pandemic.

That article created in me a sense of dread. The warning was issued but unheeded. And sure enough, we now read that “California doctors say they’ve seen more deaths from suicide than coronavirus since lockdowns.”

Doctors in Northern California say they have seen more deaths from suicide than they’ve seen from the coronavirus during the pandemic.

“The numbers are unprecedented,” Dr. Mike deBoisblanc of John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek, California, told ABC 7 News about the increase of suicide deaths adding that he’s seen a “year’s worth of suicides” in the last four weeks alone.

DeBoisblanc said he believes it’s time for California officials to end the stay-at-home order and let people back out into their communities.

“Personally, I think it’s time,” he said. “I think, originally, this was put in place to flatten the curve and to make sure hospitals have the resources to take care of COVID patients. We have the current resources to do that, and our other community health is suffering.”

Kacey Hansen, a trauma center nurse at John Muir Medical Center for over 30 years, says she’s not only worried about the increased suicide attempts but also about the hospital’s ability to save as many patients as usual.

“What I have seen recently, I have never seen before,” Hansen said. “I have never seen so much intentional injury.”…

By late March, more people had died in just one Tennessee county from suicide than had died in the entire state directly from the virus. Data out of Arizona show a similar trend.

I’m thinking that you know many people who have privately admitted to you that they have variously entered into a dark place during these times. Unemployment and having your bank account drained can do that.

It’s not just about money. Even if material provision is present, the sudden loss of freedom and life control is demoralizing and debilitating. We have always taken it for granted in America that we are in charge of our own futures. Then one day, without warning, without consultation of voters, without votes from legislatures, it was all gone. Schools, bars, gyms, parks, and whole cities were forcibly shut by executive edict, all in the name of virus control with precious little thought put to the costs or legal protections we believed were in place to protect our freedom and property. Zoom became our social outlet – and it’s a very poor substitute for the real thing. Life purpose became unclear.

The pandemic did this? Even the content alone shows that fear of disease pales in comparison to economic hardship in driving suicide. In addition, there is another huge factor: mandatory social separation is a psychological disaster.

“It’s a natural experiment, in a way,” said Matthew Nock, a psychology professor at Harvard. “There’s not only an increase in anxiety, but the more important piece is social isolation.” He added, “We’ve never had anything like this — and we know social isolation is related to suicide.”

So, yes, this can generate terrifying but predictable results. Again, the problem is material but, more profoundly, it is spiritual. Lockdowns crush dreams, impose a loss of control, separate you from friends, surround you people with police ready to arrest you for doing what only a few days earlier was perfectly normal and legal. It just didn’t seem possible that something like this could happen in America but it did.

At the same time, we are profoundly aware too that many people have been enthusiastic participants in lockdown culture. Given the scant science and medical evidence that they save lives, that they are actually achieving the goal, how can we account for the many people who not only did not enter into a dark place but rather found new purpose through them?

I draw your attention to a neglected classic: War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges. Hedges was a foreign affairs correspondent for the New York Times, and travelled the world covering war zones in Latin America, Sudan, and other hotspots. He began to notice a pattern in modern war. It not only rattled front-line soldiers. It shook entire societies and corrupted everyone. Everyone in society was dragged into it, many on the side of the state and believing that they were on a eschatological mission to defeat evil. They turn against dissidents and those who are insufficiently enthusiastic.

“The communal march against an enemy generates a warm, unfamiliar bond with our neighbors, our community, our nation, wiping out unsettling undercurrents of alienation and dislocation,” he writes. He concludes that in societies where regular life and peace seem to lack meaning for people, war gives them that meaning and purpose.

This book keeps coming back to me when people ask how it is that these lockdowns seem to have enjoyed some measure of public support, at least in the first month or so. It’s a difficult question to answer since human beings don’t usually welcome being treated like animals and pushed around with billy clubs and sprayed with mace when they resist. On the other hand, violence, shock, and awe can feel temporarily satisfying and meaningful for people who have otherwise lost a sense of life purpose.

These days in which I’m writing feel very good as compared with the last three months. People are coming to their senses and things are opening up. So many people have said something to me about how they are “so over this.” Good. I’m also receiving fewer calls from friends who are despondent. Maybe the worst is over.

And yet that data will be pouring in for many months and years: suicides, overdoses, domestic abuse, and every manner of social pathology. It was predicted and predictable. And tragically, many businesses that could help in the mental-health recovery process have closed due to the lockdown. For years we will be left with the question of why. It’s too early for final answers, but the question will haunt us for the rest of our lives.

The record shows that the global economy collapsed not because of the COVID-19 pandemic but because governments around the world, through an astonishing and grossly irresponsible use of coercive power, crushed businesses and supply chains.

Billions of people were suddenly forced into house arrest, government decided what was essential and nonessential, and gatherings of people were regulated to an extreme extent.

Thus do we live with the catastrophic results. It’s not a great depression. It’s a great suppression. Government set out one day suddenly to demolish the very foundations of liberal modernity. And they achieved this with certainty.

But did they save lives? Statisticians can find no difference in excess mortality between countries that locked down and those that did not – just as there is no relationship between a dance I do and whether it rains. Governments around the world embarked on a grand experiment in social control based on unproven theories and using untested methods.

It appears as if no good was achieved by any government in terms of disease mitigation. We are left with wrecked prosperity and ruined lives — plus a massive loss in confidence in public sector solutions all over the world.

It’s the worst policy of the modern age. And now we are hearing from pundits that the pandemic somehow shows the failure of liberalism. I find this to be a singularly bizarre conclusion. It is not markets which failed but governments. Markets, to the extent they were allowed to exist, gave us food, shelter, and medical care during the worst times. Stock markets continued to function and give us crucial information about resources and valuations.

This is a triumph, not a failure.

Perhaps the claim that liberalism has failed is based on the belief that a free society cannot deal with pandemics. In fact, in the course of the 20th century, we have multiple incidences in which disease was handled very well in the context of freedom. Medical professionals got to work and sheltered the vulnerable while mitigating disease through scientific methods. The state stayed out completely in 1949-52, 1957-58, 1968-69, 2006, and 2009. Why we took a different path in 2020 is a mystery. Regardless it was an enormous error.

The great physician Donald Henderson (1928-2016) was responsible for the eradication of smallpox around the world. He was the greatest living expert on pandemics. His view toward quarantines, travel restrictions, school closures, and restrictions on freedom was 100% negative. His principle was that nothing should ever be done to disrupt normal community functioning. Anything government does to restrict people’s freedom via coercion risks turning a managed pandemic into a “catastrophe.”

That is precisely what has happened. The world will pay the price for decades. This is not the fault of liberalism. It is the fault of terrible decision-making at all levels of society all over the world, with the possible exception of South Korea, Sweden, Japan, and a handful of other countries. This is not a time for more government control. It is time to look again at the foundations of modernity and human rights and once again believe in them and practice them.

As for disease, no one wants to be sick. No one wants to make others sick unnecessarily. If we understand those two truths, we have the basis for understanding how a free society can deal intelligently with the presence of disease. People adapt and learn. Professionals get to work with therapies and finding cures. What precisely governments can contribute to this process is unclear.

Economist F.A. Hayek spent a lifetime showing that the essential knowledge necessary to cause society to function and thrive resides in the minds of individual actors. Government is not smarter than society. Nothing is gained by pretending otherwise.

What is needed now more than ever is an immediate restoration of free trade, free enterprise, freedom of movement, commercial rights, and human rights. It’s a hard truth for governments to admit right now but they have failed all over the world. They need to admit it and leave us alone to restore prosperity and health.

For two to three months, Americans have suffered the loss of liberty, security, and prosperity in the name of virus control. The psychological impact has been beyond description. We thought we could count on basic rights and freedoms. Then over a few days in March, it all ended in ways hardly anyone could believe possible.

The manner in which governments dealt with foundational principles of modernity has been shocking. They put half the country under house arrest and managed every movement in disregard for the Bill of Rights and all legal precedent, to say nothing of the Constitution. It felt like a coercive unraveling of civilization itself. It’s like we are all waking up from a bad dream only to look around and see the wreckage that proves it was all real.

So how can we deal with this terror that befell us? One way is to figure out some aspect in which our sacrifice has been worth it, maybe not on net given the consequences, but surely some good has come out of this. If my email and feeds are correct, this is how many people have been justifying this. The psychology here is rooted in the sunk-cost fallacy: when you commit resources to something, even when it is a proven error, you tend to find justifications by doubling down rather than just admitting the mistake.

Thus have many people written me to say that whether you agree or disagree with the lockdown, we have to admit that it has saved millions of lives. I always write back and ask how they know that. They send me a link to a projection – those very projections that presume all kinds of things about cause and effect that we cannot know and which have proven wrong time and again throughout this crisis.

So let’s just grant that it is possible that lockdowns can be credited with slowing the spread of the virus, and perhaps preserving hospital capacity (which turned out to be unnecessary). Still, the virus doesn’t then get bored and move by to Wuhan or to another planet. It still sticks around, so at best, these measures only “prolong the pain,” in the words of Knut Wittkowski.

So even if lockdowns slow the spread in the short run, it’s not clear that they have saved lives from the coronavirus, even if it results in more death overall from deferred surgeries and diagnostics, suicides, drug overdoses, and depression.

The trouble here is that certain features of this experience stand out to contradict the idea that lockdowns are saving lives over the longer term. In New York, two thirds of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 were in fact sheltering in place during the lockdown, essentially living in forced isolation. The lockdown didn’t help them; it might have contributed to making matters worse.

Meanwhile, despite the media hate poured out against Florida’s youthful spring break revelers, where hundreds of thousands declined to socially distance at the height of the virus risk, I’ve yet to find a credible report of fatalities beyond two that were probably unpreventable. This is because the risks to the younger population are negligible, as we’ve known for a long time now.

These environments are neither locked down nor open; the virus spread among the most vulnerable population after even just one exposure due to possible negligence and distraction by mass frenzy. In the midst of locking down the whole world, and our politicians were consumed with the desire to enforce stay-at-home orders and forced separation, the population that needed the most care was neglected. Even worse, in New York, California, and New Jersey, nursing homes were forced to take in COVID-19 patients.

One way we might discern whether and to what extent lockdowns have had any effect on infection and death is to examine the empirical case. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, T.J. Rodgers examined all the existing studies:

Do quick shutdowns work to fight the spread of Covid-19? Joe Malchow, Yinon Weiss and I wanted to find out. We set out to quantify how many deaths were caused by delayed shutdown orders on a state-by-state basis.

To normalize for an unambiguous comparison of deaths between states at the midpoint of an epidemic, we counted deaths per million population for a fixed 21-day period, measured from when the death rate first hit 1 per million—e.g.,‒three deaths in Iowa or 19 in New York state. A state’s “days to shutdown” was the time after a state crossed the 1 per million threshold until it ordered businesses shut down.

We ran a simple one-variable correlation of deaths per million and days to shutdown, which ranged from minus-10 days (some states shut down before any sign of Covid-19) to 35 days for South Dakota, one of seven states with limited or no shutdown. The correlation coefficient was 5.5%—so low that the engineers I used to employ would have summarized it as “no correlation” and moved on to find the real cause of the problem. (The trendline sloped downward—states that delayed more tended to have lower death rates—but that’s also a meaningless result due to the low correlation coefficient.)

No conclusions can be drawn about the states that sheltered quickly, because their death rates ran the full gamut, from 20 per million in Oregon to 360 in New York. This wide variation means that other variables—like population density or subway use—were more important. Our correlation coefficient for per-capita death rates vs. the population density was 44%. That suggests New York City might have benefited from its shutdown—but blindly copying New York’s policies in places with low Covid-19 death rates, such as my native Wisconsin, doesn’t make sense.

Turning to the international front, consider the work of Isaac Ben-Israel, head of the Security Studies program in Tel Aviv University and the chairman of the National Council for Research and Development. His detailed study from around the world compares locked down countries with those that stayed open. The Times of Israel summarizes his findings as follows.

A prominent Israeli mathematician, analyst and former general claims simple statistical analysis demonstrates that the spread of COVID-19 peaks after about 40 days and declines to almost zero after 70 days — no matter where it strikes, and no matter what measures governments impose to try to thwart it.

Even a casual look at the open societies of Sweden and Korea – despite going too far in interventions – demonstrate that they experienced lower rates of death than Europe and the U.K. Even the World Health Organization has praised Sweden’s response.

On the basis of the available data, we find that a lockdown in Sweden would not have limited the number of infections or the number of COVID-19 deaths. Theory suggests that this may be the result of people maintaining a larger social distance even in the absence of a lockdown—there could be, in other words, voluntary social restraint. Krueger et al. (2020), in particular, show this in the context of a formal model and suggest that this may be the relevant case for Sweden

There’s little correlation between the severity of a nation’s restrictions and whether it managed to curb excess fatalities — a measure that looks at the overall number of deaths compared with normal trends.

Cause and effect are notoriously difficult to discern in human affairs on a macroscale. Even if it connects somehow to intuition that locking down keeps the virus away, they do not deal with the reality that the virus is still there, even if temporarily contained (which itself is arguable).

Quarantines, lockdowns, shelter-in-place orders and so on reflect a premodern bias and an unscientific impulse to run away and hide, a method used from the ancient world through selective quarantines in some cities in 1918. Then we got smart, developed a modern theory of viruses (well explained here), and eschewed them in every pandemic since World War II. Then, somehow, and mysteriously, one century flipped to the next and we got dumb again and here we are.

Did the lockdown save lives? It’s possible but not yet proven, and the evidence so far points to a negative answer. No matter how much we try to spin this in our heads, no matter how much we want to believe that something good has come out of this catastrophe, we are all going to have someday to deal with the terrible but likely reality that it was all for naught.

I conclude with the words of the great physician who is credited with smallpox eradication, Donald A. Henderson (1928-2016).

The interest in quarantine reflects the views and conditions prevalent more than 50 years ago, when much less was known about the epidemiology of infectious diseases and when there was far less international and domestic travel in a less densely populated world. It is difficult to identify circumstances in the past half-century when large-scale quarantine has been effectively used in the control of any disease. The negative consequences of large-scale quarantine are so extreme (forced confinement of sick people with the well; complete restriction of movement of large populations; difficulty in getting critical supplies, medicines, and food to people inside the quarantine zone) that this mitigation measure should be eliminated from serious consideration.

Now begins the grand effort, on display in thousands of articles and news broadcasts daily, somehow to normalize the lockdown and all its destruction of the last two months. We didn’t lock down almost the entire country in 1968/69,1957, or 1949-1952, or even during 1918. But in a terrifying few days in March 2020, it happened to all of us, causing an avalanche of social, cultural, and economic destruction that will ring through the ages.

There was nothing normal about it all. We’ll be trying to figure out what happened to us for decades hence.

How did a temporary plan to preserve hospital capacity turn into two-to-three months of near-universal house arrest that ended up causing worker furloughs at 256 hospitals, a stoppage of international travel, a 40% job loss among people earning less than $40K per year, devastation of every economic sector, mass confusion and demoralization, a complete ignoring of all fundamental rights and liberties, not to mention the mass confiscation of private property with forced closures of millions of businesses?

Whatever the answer, it’s got to be a bizarre tale. What’s truly surprising is just how recent the theory behind lockdown and forced distancing actually is. So far as anyone can tell, the intellectual machinery that made this mess was invented 14 years ago, and not by epidemiologists but by computer-simulation modelers. It was adopted not by experienced doctors – they warned ferociously against it – but by politicians.

Let’s start with the phrase social distancing, which has mutated into forced human separation. The first I had heard it was in the 2011 movie Contagion. The first time it appeared in the New York Times was February 12, 2006:

If the avian flu goes pandemic while Tamiflu and vaccines are still in short supply, experts say, the only protection most Americans will have is “social distancing,” which is the new politically correct way of saying “quarantine.”

But distancing also encompasses less drastic measures, like wearing face masks, staying out of elevators — and the [elbow] bump. Such stratagems, those experts say, will rewrite the ways we interact, at least during the weeks when the waves of influenza are washing over us.

Maybe you don’t remember that the avian flu of 2006 didn’t amount to much. It’s true, despite all the extreme warnings about its lethality, H5N1 didn’t turn into much at all. What it did do, however, was send the existing president, George W. Bush, to the library to read about the 1918 flu and its catastrophic results. He asked for some experts to submit some plans to him about what to do when the real thing comes along.

Fourteen years ago, two federal government doctors, Richard Hatchett and Carter Mecher, met with a colleague at a burger joint in suburban Washington for a final review of a proposal they knew would be treated like a piñata: telling Americans to stay home from work and school the next time the country was hit by a deadly pandemic.

When they presented their plan not long after, it was met with skepticism and a degree of ridicule by senior officials, who like others in the United States had grown accustomed to relying on the pharmaceutical industry, with its ever-growing array of new treatments, to confront evolving health challenges.

Drs. Hatchett and Mecher were proposing instead that Americans in some places might have to turn back to an approach, self-isolation, first widely employed in the Middle Ages.

How that idea — born out of a request by President George W. Bush to ensure the nation was better prepared for the next contagious disease outbreak — became the heart of the national playbook for responding to a pandemic is one of the untold stories of the coronavirus crisis.

It brought their work together with that of a Defense Department team assigned to a similar task.

And it had some unexpected detours, including a deep dive into the history of the 1918 Spanish flu and an important discovery kicked off by a high school research project pursued by the daughter of a scientist at the Sandia National Laboratories.

The concept of social distancing is now intimately familiar to almost everyone. But as it first made its way through the federal bureaucracy in 2006 and 2007, it was viewed as impractical, unnecessary and politically infeasible.

Notice that in the course of this planning, neither legal nor economic experts were brought in to consult and advise. Instead it fell to Mecher (formerly of Chicago and an intensive care doctor with no previous expertise in pandemics) and the oncologist Hatchett.

But what is this mention of the high-school daughter of 14? Her name is Laura M. Glass, and she recently declined to be interviewed when the Albuquerque Journal did a deep dive of this history.

Laura, with some guidance from her dad, devised a computer simulation that showed how people – family members, co-workers, students in schools, people in social situations – interact. What she discovered was that school kids come in contact with about 140 people a day, more than any other group. Based on that finding, her program showed that in a hypothetical town of 10,000 people, 5,000 would be infected during a pandemic if no measures were taken, but only 500 would be infected if the schools were closed.

Laura’s name appears on the foundational paper arguing for lockdowns and forced human separation. That paper is Targeted Social Distancing Designs for Pandemic Influenza (2006). It set out a model for forced separation and applied it with good results backwards in time to 1957. They conclude with a chilling call for what amounts to a totalitarian lockdown, all stated very matter-of-factly.

Implementation of social distancing strategies is challenging. They likely must be imposed for the duration of the local epidemic and possibly until a strain-specific vaccine is developed and distributed. If compliance with the strategy is high over this period, an epidemic within a community can be averted. However, if neighboring communities do not also use these interventions, infected neighbors will continue to introduce influenza and prolong the local epidemic, albeit at a depressed level more easily accommodated by healthcare systems.

In other words, it was a high-school science experiment that eventually became law of the land, and through a circuitous route propelled not by science but politics.

The primary author of this paper was Robert J. Glass, a complex-systems analyst with Sandia National Laboratories. He had no medical training, much less an expertise in immunology or epidemiology.

That explains why Dr. D.A. Henderson, “who had been the leader of the international effort to eradicate smallpox,” completely rejected the whole scheme.

Says the NYT:

Dr. Henderson was convinced that it made no sense to force schools to close or public gatherings to stop. Teenagers would escape their homes to hang out at the mall. School lunch programs would close, and impoverished children would not have enough to eat. Hospital staffs would have a hard time going to work if their children were at home.

The measures embraced by Drs. Mecher and Hatchett would “result in significant disruption of the social functioning of communities and result in possibly serious economic problems,” Dr. Henderson wrote in his own academic paper responding to their ideas.

The answer, he insisted, was to tough it out: Let the pandemic spread, treat people who get sick and work quickly to develop a vaccine to prevent it from coming back.

Their paper is a remarkably readable refutation of the entire lock-down model.

There are no historical observations or scientific studies that support the confinement by quarantine of groups of possibly infected people for extended periods in order to slow the spread of influenza. … It is difficult to identify circumstances in the past half-century when large-scale quarantine has been effectively used in the control of any disease. The negative consequences of large-scale quarantine are so extreme (forced confinement of sick people with the well; complete restriction of movement of large populations; difficulty in getting critical supplies, medicines, and food to people inside the quarantine zone) that this mitigation measure should be eliminated from serious consideration…

Home quarantine also raises ethical questions. Implementation of home quarantine could result in healthy, uninfected people being placed at risk of infection from sick household members. Practices to reduce the chance of transmission (hand-washing, maintaining a distance of 3 feet from infected people, etc.) could be recommended, but a policy imposing home quarantine would preclude, for example, sending healthy children to stay with relatives when a family member becomes ill. Such a policy would also be particularly hard on and dangerous to people living in close quarters, where the risk of infection would be heightened….

Travel restrictions, such as closing airports and screening travelers at borders, have historically been ineffective. The World Health Organization Writing Group concluded that “screening and quarantining entering travelers at international borders did not substantially delay virus introduction in past pandemics . . . and will likely be even less effective in the modern era.”… It is reasonable to assume that the economic costs of shutting down air or train travel would be very high, and the societal costs involved in interrupting all air or train travel would be extreme. …

During seasonal influenza epidemics, public events with an expected large attendance have sometimes been cancelled or postponed, the rationale being to decrease the number of contacts with those who might be contagious. There are, however, no certain indications that these actions have had any definitive effect on the severity or duration of an epidemic. Were consideration to be given to doing this on a more extensive scale and for an extended period, questions immediately arise as to how many such events would be affected. There are many social gatherings that involve close contacts among people, and this prohibition might include church services, athletic events, perhaps all meetings of more than 100 people. It might mean closing theaters, restaurants, malls, large stores, and bars. Implementing such measures would have seriously disruptive consequences…

Schools are often closed for 1–2 weeks early in the development of seasonal community outbreaks of influenza primarily because of high absentee rates, especially in elementary schools, and because of illness among teachers. This would seem reasonable on practical grounds. However, to close schools for longer periods is not only impracticable but carries the possibility of a serious adverse outcome….

Thus, cancelling or postponing large meetings would not be likely to have any significant effect on the development of the epidemic. While local concerns may result in the closure of particular events for logical reasons, a policy directing communitywide closure of public events seems inadvisable. Quarantine. As experience shows, there is no basis for recommending quarantine either of groups or individuals. The problems in implementing such measures are formidable, and secondary effects of absenteeism and community disruption as well as possible adverse consequences, such as loss of public trust in government and stigmatization of quarantined people and groups, are likely to be considerable….

Finally, the remarkable conclusion:

Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted. Strong political and public health leadership to provide reassurance and to ensure that needed medical care services are provided are critical elements. If either is seen to be less than optimal, a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.

Confronting a manageable epidemic and turning it into a catastrophe: that seems like a good description of everything that has happened in the COVID-19 crisis of 2020.

Thus did some of the most highly trained and experienced experts on epidemics warn with biting rhetoric against everything that the advocates of lockdown proposed. It was not even a real-world idea in the first place and showed no actual knowledge of viruses and disease mitigation. Again, the idea was born of a high-school science experiment using agent-based modelling techniques having nothing at all to do with real life, real science, or real medicine.

The [Bush] administration ultimately sided with the proponents of social distancing and shutdowns — though their victory was little noticed outside of public health circles. Their policy would become the basis for government planning and would be used extensively in simulations used to prepare for pandemics, and in a limited way in 2009 during an outbreak of the influenza called H1N1. Then the coronavirus came, and the plan was put to work across the country for the first time.

[Post-publication note: You can read the 2007 CDC paper here. It is arguable that this paper did not favor full lockdown. I’ve spoken to Rajeev Venkayya, MD, who regards the 2007 plan as more liberal, and assures me that they never envisioned this level of lockdown: “lockdowns and shelter-in-place were not part of the recommendations.” To my mind, fleshing out the full relationship between this 2007 document and current policy requires a separate article.]

The Times called one of the pro-lockdown researchers, Dr. Howard Markel, and asked what he thought of the lockdowns. His answer: he is glad that his work was used to “save lives” but added, “It is also horrifying.” “We always knew this would be applied in worst-case scenarios,” he said. “Even when you are working on dystopian concepts, you always hope it will never be used.”

Ideas have consequences, as they say. Dream up an idea for a virus-controlling totalitarian society, one without an endgame and eschewing any experienced-based evidence that it would achieve the goal, and you might see it implemented someday. Lockdown might be the new orthodoxy but that doesn’t make it medically sound or morally correct. At least now we know that many great doctors and scholars in 2006 did their best to stop this nightmare from unfolding. Their mighty paper should serve as a blueprint for dealing with the next pandemic.